It's not a complex activity - it's a random set of procedural bits repeatedly acting as if it's a complete procedure. I know I'm repeating myself on that, but these books went on and on acting as if they were complete procedures, for years and years. The only approach ends up beinga a fight fire with fire thing with the usual social rules on not repeating oneself being unfair, since these books aren't following those social rules and just pumpin' out their message 24/7. So people can argue about complex activites, granted, but it's still not the real issue - it's really not to do with anything being complex. Write a program that generates a random set of rules and prints it, then on the front put an acknowledgement people disagree during complex activities - you can see such an acknowledgement is missplaced. The text has random rules, it is not complex. It generates disagreement because it presents the group with raw chaos, not because it's complex.

The parents sitting in idea is really interesting - yeah, that passing on of how to deal with crap with a real life, physically present person who has a stake in all this (someone in the group is their kid) really would be alot different. Good point. Otherwise what your getting is rather similar to lord of the flies, but to my mind with a religious angle, since people keep stabing at text in a book as some sort of authority as to how the other people have to behave. And sadly, you also make a point with '(but what parent has time, and what 15 year old wants to play with their parents?)'.

Though, and perhaps this is shocking - I'm not sure about gamer parents sitting in with their children. It'll just pass on whatever lord of the flies behaviour they learnt. Perhaps over generations it'll start to smooth out as people in latter generations stop putting up with some of the shit. But it'd no doubt evolve into much the same culture as everyone has toward boardgames, in the end, making the passing on both problematic for several generations, and in the end, pointless.

Well, I guess this new group I'm joining will be the acid test for the system's playability (or my compatibility with it). Much more mature and experienced gamers, with far less external pressure on them, and one GM instead of several, should all lead to a clearer social contract and a unified interpretation of the rules. I might find it's serviceable even if the system isn't my first choice, or I may find that I still can't stand it.